


hypnotica

by orphan_account



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Adults, Birds, Children, Drain, Flowers, Happy, Inspired By Random Words, Night, Other, Purity, Queen - Freeform, The Author Regrets Nothing, Velvet - Freeform, Writing, chapters do not correspond to each other, dead, girls, no beta we die like my ability to actually write something with a plot, original - Freeform, own work, prompts, writing this using random words
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:02:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29126925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: a series of passages using prompts of random words.set in hypnotica, a fictional world of my own creation.everything told from the narrator’s pov.
Relationships: None
Comments: 4
Kudos: 1





	1. the night bird

**Author's Note:**

> words used: bird, night, children, adult

It’s a small village. Not many people, an abundance of children though, turning cartwheels in the sunlight. Often adults watch from their windows at the children and make small, disapproving noises at them, because they’re not people and never will be. Then they go back inside their houses and shut the windows and slip back into their blissfully mundane lives.

The children have a penchant for conversing with the night bird. No one knows what it looks like, and you won’t either, unless you are a child, which I highly doubt because children are not in the habit of reading about themselves, or talking about themselves at all in fact. Either way, they like the night bird and the night bird likes them.

As I was writing this an adult looked over my shoulder and sniffed and told me to capitalize the words night bird but I know the night bird wouldn’t like that. It enjoys pretending it’s like any other bird. Well. Not really pretending, for like I said the children often spend time with it and cling to its wings in their dreams and wake up feeling born again but the adults don’t even know anything of it (they act like they do, but they’re not children and never will be), so really, the only ones who can talk about the rarity of the night bird are the children. And they don’t think it’s rare at all.

The adults have been told silly things like if they talk polite and act nice and float through the world without any emotion (and die, they think to themselves at night when the moon is cresting over window tips and fear crashes in them, alone in a bed midday and wondering if this was really the way to go) and write things how they’re supposed to be and say things like they’re not, they’ll see the night bird. It’s lies, all of it. The children know better.

The children know better, but they don’t brag about it. I knew children who would go down to the river with soil between their hands and toes and their mind curtained off to the rest of the world, their souls slipping on moss, and dunk their heads under the water and be dangling from one of its claws. I knew children who would knock on the walls when their parents weren’t home, feeling for that one specific spot that was weak and seemed to hold burning laughter in it like whitewash, and from there they’d wriggle through the cracks like bugs or light or unwanted thoughts, and they’d be rolling between its feathers on a sunny hill. They never know where to go or why to go but they end up there anyway.

The adults aren’t jealous exactly of the children. They just suppose it’s unfair that things so small and puny that are not even people could possibly find magic in something as great as the night bird. They don’t pause to think for a moment or two that the magic is for the children because they are not people, and because of that reason only.

I write this sitting and watching out the window. An adult is walking above my head talking dimly to their friend in the attic. Some others stand in the street and exchange news that is yet to be forgotten, all the time watching the children while pretending they aren’t. They all know they are, but none of them dare to raise a finger or raise a voice and wonder why they’re so interested in small things that can’t be qualified (in their eyes) as people wandering the streets and bumping into imaginary things at every turn and giggling to themselves infuriatingly (endearingly, from afar) about a magic they call the night bird.

I’ve been sitting here watching for a long time. Years, maybe. Centuries pass in moments, dust gathers on my tablecloth and typewriter, coffee curls into the air, a heavy, reluctant, remorseful but accepting feeling settles in as well if you’re not quick enough. Maybe that’s why the children run so fast, they don’t want it to touch them.

Sometimes, or often if you count all the times I’ve forgotten, I lie awake a few minutes before I fall into sleep or some version of it, and I listen, really listen. My senses blossom like flowers and pulse hoarsely in the air like they’ve been screaming and I’ve only just noticed. I get a strange feeling. I like to think it’s the night bird. But that of course wouldn’t be true because I’m not a child, so I must dismiss it as a wanting. I do wonder, though.

The night bird makes everything slow down and fall into some sort on incandescent downward spiral, madness curling around beauty until they’re one and the same. You don’t see blood, you don’t see tears, you only see joy. The night bird flies through it all.

The adults will keep whispering, the children will keep dancing, the night bird will keep flying, and I will keep watching. Waiting. And wanting.


	2. purity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> words used: velvet, queen, drain, purity

There is a queen living in the sewer. She lives with rats. She picks them off her clothes and whispers silly things and secrets in equal parts to them, sticks dainty fingers in their mouth as and giggles as they nip at her nails.

She ran here one day because of fear. (Most things are because of fear when you think about it, but that’s beside the point). Her kingdom was crumbling, her loyal subjects and servants were turning away from her and ascending into some filthy-clean dimension she’d never touch.

“Over my dead body,” she spat at them when they looked down on her and reached back and held out hands soft and pale and white and cold, so cold, and begged her to come with them and fly with them.

“They’re angels,” she chuckles, a cigarette in her hand, warm and burning the blood off the skin where the rats’ mouthed have touched her. “They’re angels, but they don’t know the luxury I live in.”

She was fearful that day, yes, that they would drag her away from her warm and wet and soiled dominion into someplace icy and leave her to die in the snow with a smile on the premise of being kind. She isn’t afraid any more, though. That’s what she tells me.

I flick my pen between my teeth (perhaps her fidgety sewer ways are catching up to me) me and ask about the rats. She giggles and the giggle echoes in the sewer, white butterflies and dark, peaceful things alike crawling out of the drains. “They’re my friends,” she tells me, tickling their whiskers with her hands gently and rushing at them with peppery kisses that stink of beauty and dirt, until they’ve had enough and disappear beneath the folds of her skirt once again.

I ask about the red hearts painted on her cheeks, and she taps her muddy boots against the floor, shaking some glitter from their soles. She tells me, “They remind me of my old kingdom before everyone became obsessed with purity,” and then she says, her bubbly demeanor disappearing and becoming replaced with a hateful snarl like a wolf fighting for its life, “I hate purity.” I nod and write it down and mull over it for a few moments and then come to the realization that so do most people, but won’t admit it.

I ask about her feelings. She doesn’t want to talk about those.

I ask about the lone metal chair in the corner of the room, rickety and nicked and bleeding with sap and tears, and she says with a high-pitched laugh like a swallow escaping from a cage, “It’s my throne.” I tell her it’s a chair. She kicks her feet back and looks at it and picks at her lip with one bloodied hand and explains to me all the times she’s held it, crying, her only comfort, the only reassurance that she was still a queen and still ruled over something. She tells me, “That makes it a throne.”

I ask about the bars on the windows. She adjusts her earrings with a brief displeasure and looks around, her hands jangling. She tells me, “I see no bars, only velvet.” I tell her that I’m talking about beyond the velvet, on the outside, where people can look in and throw things and stick their slimy tongues and fingers in, hoping for a glimpse of the myth, of the legend, the queen. She spits. “They come in and laugh and then scream to me about purity.” The bars, she describes, are there to keep out people who think light is somehow better.

I put away my pen and my pencil and my typewriter and stand up and shake her hand, very carefully wipe away the gore with a cloth of mine. She insists that I kiss her hand as I leave, and I do, the salty-sweet taste of youth and stains and ichor dripping down my teeth like silt and a mudslide. I tell her I must be getting off and she waves me out with no hesitation. I see her rats hovering around her arms, hissing.

I crawl out of the drain, sit down on the curb that is stained with graffiti and shoe imprints, and settle in to look for purity. I am here until seasons go from sludge to red and I’m unaware of whether I’m still on the curb or in the sewer in some annex that the queen hasn’t told me about. I see no purity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are always appreciated <3


	3. the dead things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> words used: flower, girl, dead, happy

In the beginning I was a flower, cold and wispy as stone and sprouting from something oaky-green. I was carefully articulated with petals like little moons that rose around my fingers and leaves like a shy sun in the morning. I was fragile, beautiful, delicate, a treasure that no one could see. Buried under a blanket of coal and moss and diamonds that holed their way into caves. I was content.

Content to be a flower and be a pretty object that did neither what people wanted nor disobeyed them, content to be a living little star in a dead world of things that were happy. I was alive, and not happy, but content. The dead things were happy.

Some days I raised up my trembling leaves and opened them to the sun and stared out the diamond windows that were never there and smiled at the land that never looked my way and pitied them, because they were living and they were happy. What a shame it must be to be happy, because when the happiness is gone you must find something else to take its place. Otherwise you rot. This is what the dead things told me, and this is how I learned that the way to be immortal was to never be happy.

Then one day a girl fell down a rabbit hole with a basket and golden hair that sprung about her face delightfully, a rough blue pinafore and lips stained red with summers of raspberries. She landed in the cave and was shocked at me and the dead things. They were beautiful.

I strained for her attention. I longed for her. I loved her. But she hopped around like a frisky little rabbit or deer between the dead things, staring at them, muttering to herself, pressing her ruby lips against the surfaces (I wonder if she was looking for flavor. Dead things, for your information, taste like hope and simultaneously the absence of it).

It took me some time to understand that she was happy. I was disgusted. I was ashamed. She had been my love. I reached for her. I grew towards her. She was my sunlight among the dead things. But she only wanted the dead things, she was happy, and I hated it. I shriveled into myself, but I didn’t die.

One day, by chance perhaps, with her feet slipping over the cobblestone with a whine, she stumbled, and suddenly her face was looking close to mine. I would have been guilty to turn away from her so I remained still and quiet as she stared at me and poked her fingers at me and clicked her tongue at me with an expression of such pity I wondered if she was seeing something else.

She plucked me from the dirt. I screamed. She tucked me into her hair and mopped up the guts that dripped from my limbs.

She gathered up stacks and armfuls of the dead things and skipped around the cave, tossing them here and there, arranging them perhaps. I couldn’t tell. She seemed to like scattering them everywhere and crushing their petals underfoot with a sound like a whisper and a thunderstorm.

And it was at that moment I realized the dead things were not dead. I was.

I awoke in a cold sweat, something clutched to my chest, and I would have seen a flower had it not been for my bad vision. When I blinked, the flower was gone in a flash of cold sweat. I sat up and reassured myself that I was not dead. I didn’t really believe it. I knew better. I think we all did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are always appreciated <3

**Author's Note:**

> comments are always appreciated <3


End file.
